Letter From Britain: Secrets of the Ads That 'Stalk' You

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Letter From Britain: Secrets of the Ads That 'Stalk' You

LONDON - Imagine walking into a shoe shop in the high street, picking up and looking at a few pairs of shoes, before putting them down and leaving the store. Then imagine checking out a few other shops before popping into a newsagent, where you start flicking through a newspaper. As you do this, a display appears with the exact same shoes that you were interested in half an hour earlier, along with a deal attempting to lure you back to make a purchase.

That experience is pretty much analogous to personalized re-targeting in the online advertising world and might explain why you might sometimes feel like those shoes or those bikes are stalking you across the web.

Brands such as Office and Halfords are amongst the first in the U.K. to employ this sort of re-targeting technology, provided by companies such as Criteo and Struq. Take a visit to one of their websites, browse a few items and then check out thesun.co.uk and you are pretty likely to be greeted by your selected items in an ad on the side of the site. See below:

How does it work? Well, as you visit a website that is using the technology, you get tagged with an anonymous cookie that tracks which products you show an interest in. When you leave the website, the re-targeting company finds out when you emerge on one of its partner publishers (where it places ads) and then delivers a unique personalized banner based on your browsing history. They can also target consumers with the items from a shopping cart that's been abandoned.

Criteo also combines behavioral data with a recommendation algorithm (similar to Amazon’s) to re-target the consumer with the potential purchases they were interested in and other items that other people who have browsed or purchased those items have been interested in.

Re-targeting is nothing new – brands have used the technique to deliver ads relevant to, for example, the section of an e-commerce site they have been looking at for a few years. However, there would generally be a set number of ads (perhaps a dozen or so), with the most relevant one being displayed to the browser.

He added that their ads not only increase clickthrough rates, but also increase conversion rates – where people actually buy the item in the ad. “Most retailers convert 2-10 percent of all of their traffic, but this is usually more like 2-5 percent. In very successful campaigns we have doubled conversion rates.”

Online ads are an unavoidable part of the digital media ecosystem, so surely having a truly relevant ad that speaks to you individually is better than one that doesn't? Online advertising, with the exception of paid search – dominated by Google – has traditionally taken on a broadcast approach, matching ads to content on a publisher’s pages – so an article about clothes is surrounded by fashion advertising.

Google’s Pay-Per-Click AdWords system matches ads based on an individual’s exact search terms. “We aim to bring the Google approach to search into display, bringing more relevance to the advertising we see online,” said Steckler.

Unsurprisingly, there have already been a number of breathless reports from privacy advocates about evil online advertisers watching your every move. The Sunday Times described the plight of William Key who “knew he was being followed – even though he didn’t leave his house for a second”.

As we become more and more used to personalizing our web experience, it seems strange that some people react so strongly. Users can opt out of receiving these sorts of ads by clicking on an icon on the banner. It doesn’t seem to be any more intrusive than the ads found in, say, Gmail.

Although, perhaps you don’t want that ball gag you checked out online following you, like a shameful specter, to the more sanitized corners of the web.